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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Drake head coach Ben McCollum paced in the coaches’ locker room before speed-walking in to address his team. His assistants had told him the players were a little quiet during warmups for the Wildcat Classic, a mid-December game against Kansas State in downtown Kansas City.
Bennett Stirtz, star point guard, attended the game as a fan a year ago. Isaiah Jackson, whose childhood home is 15 minutes from T-Mobile Center, had watched many games in the building but never stepped on the floor. When he walked through the tunnel, he took out his phone and captured the moment, then FaceTimed his parents after practice so they could see.
Stirtz and Jackson are two of the four starters who followed McCollum from Division II Northwest Missouri State when he was hired by Drake this offseason. They’d played in big games, but no environment like this. So McCollum decided to recycle a speech he’d given before the 2021 Division II national title game when he’d had a similar feeling.
McCollum told his players to imagine there was a balance beam on the floor – four inches wide, five meters long. Could they walk across it? “Hell, yeah, you can.” Now raise it 10 feet in the air. You may think twice, but most could still make it. Now what if it was 150 feet in the air? “The same balance beam that you just told me you could walk across when it was on the ground because there were no repercussions to it, all of a sudden it lifts a little bit and you can’t walk across it anymore? Why? Because you lost the ability to walk? No. You can still do that. Because you’re distracted by everything else around you.” McCollum’s point: Block it out – the crowd, the noise – and just put one foot in front of the other.
Later that night, the Bulldogs sprinted back into that locker room, knocking off a Big 12 team on a shot by Stirtz with 3.4 seconds left in overtime.
Drake opened 2025 as one of the final four undefeated teams in Division I, playing with a confidence reinforced by the results its leaders brought from the D-II ranks. The Bulldogs faced their first setback Wednesday, dropping their Missouri Valley Conference road opener 74-70 to UIC, but they’re off to a 12-1 start that no one saw coming, with three wins over high-major programs.
“Why did it take so long for McCollum to get a Division I job?” he was asked. “I’m a slow trigger by nature, because I evaluate every decision quite a bit.”
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